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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Today in Labor History—January 6

January 6, 1878 - Author-poet Carl Sandburg was
born on this date in Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg worked as a labor organizer,
published in the International Socialist Review and later worker for the
Chicago Daily News. The Feds accused him of being a Bolshevik symp, when he was
actually just a working class symp. Sandburg died on July 22, 1967. (From
the Daily Bleed and
Workday
Minnesota)

WORKING GIRLS (by Carl Sandburg)

THE working
girls in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Each morning as I move through this river of young-
woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all
going, so many with a peach bloom of young years
on them and laughter of red lips and memories in
their eyes of dances the night before and plays and
walks.
Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and
so here are always the others, those who have been
over the way, the women who know each one the
end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the
clew, the how and the why of the dances and the
arms that passed around their waists and the fingers
that played in their hair.
Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where
the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,"
and the feet of these move slower and they
have wisdom where the others have beauty.
So the green and the gray move in the early morning
on the downtown streets.

January 6, 1882 - The
Toronto Labor Council voted to support equal pay for equal work. (From Workday
Minnesota)

January 6, 1916 – A strike was called at the
Youngstown Sheet & Tube plant by its 8,000 workers. On January 7, strikers
were joined by their wives and other family members on the picket line. Company
guards attacked the crowd with tear gas bombs and live fire killing three
strikers and wounding 25 others.(From the Daily Bleed)

January 6, 1937 – The Abraham Lincoln Brigade
formed to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Roughly 4,000 American men
and women fought for the Republicans, most in violation of U.S. law. Nearly
2,000 of them died of wounds or disease. One of the casualties was Oliver Law,
the first black man known to have commanded white U.S. troops. He led the Tom
Mooney Machine-Gun Company (named for labor organizer Tom Mooney (see here,here and here),
who spent years in prison on trumped up charges related to the San Francisco
Preparedness Day bombing. (From the Daily Bleed)